GOOD TRASH "Up yours!" Kelsey Grammer barks with perfect diction as an unshaven, antisocial, Wordsworth-spouting cop in The Innocent(NBC, Sept. 25, 9-11 p.m.), a knockoff of Witness, except without all those Amish people. Grammer's bad- tempered lieutenant protects an autistic savant (cloying Macaulay Culkin clone Keegan Macintosh) who has seen a murder. The role's a stretch for Grammer, but he pulls it off with aplomb. Wisely, the film's hardest-boiled dialogue has been dealt to Dean Stockwell, as Grammer's hotheaded boss. "There's a lot of meat in the fire here-my meat and your meat!" Stockwell bellows at one point. Frasier would never say that.
You haven't lived until you've seen the Tori Spelling stabbing scene in A Friend To Die For (NBC, Sept. 26, 9-11 p.m.), a knockoff of Heathers, except all the humor is unintentional. When Spelling's queen-bitch cheerleader is knifed by a misfit classmate (Kellie Martin, a long way from Life Goes On), the 90210 nepotism poster-child musters all her meager acting skills. A perfect trickle of blood running from her pert mouth, Spelling stumbles, rolls her eyes back in her head, then collapses, her hands twitching at her sides (Emmy voters, take note). Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there.
CHOICE RERUNS One of the funkiest series in TV history, The White Shadow (Nick at Nite, Saturdays, 10-11 p.m.) cast Ken Howard as an ex-Chicago Bull who coaches basketball at a rough-and-tumble L.A. high school. Till its third and final season (1980-81), when CBS insisted on lightening its tone, Shadow offered gratifyingly downbeat drama. In the episode Nick at Nite will air on Oct. 1, for example, Howard's Coach Ken Reeves finds out a hot recruit is mixed up with bookies, thieves, and killers. The show's true legacy, however, may be that two of its players, Kevin "Thorpe" Hooks and Thomas "Hayward" Carter, became big-screen directors (Hooks did Passenger 57, Carter Swing Kids). No word on what's become of Ira "Go-Go Gomez" Angustain or Timothy "Salami" Van Patten.
